The discussion of any work, publications, sales, or activity anywhere in this submission, including in any documents submitted with this application and in any documents incorporated herein by reference, shall not be taken as an admission by the inventors that any such work constitutes prior art. The discussion of any activity, work, or publication herein is not an admission that such activity, work, or publication existed or was known in any particular jurisdiction.
Metering and marking are generally known techniques in modern communication systems to control the data rate at various points within a communication system. In a typical application, a metering and marking unit and/or process and/or component may be used to limit the rate at which a customer can inject (or transmit or upload) data into a network.
It is further known that when providing network data to a system that allows differentiated services, a user may provide data units (e.g., packets) that are classified at different importance levels. Packets belonging to a particular importance level may be guaranteed priority access to network resources—reducing delay and guaranteeing bandwidth.
Generally, in order to regulate the amount of traffic of a given importance level accepted by the network, the temporal profile of an input data stream (e.g., bytes per second (BPS) or bytes per microsecond (BPμs)) is measured against a pre-configured profile using one or more selected algorithms. Some known algorithms assign as a result of this measuring one of three determinations to input data: (1) in profile, (2) marginally above profile, and (3) in excess of an agreed-to profile. These three determinations can also be referred to as: (1) conformant, (2) partially conformant, and (3) non-conformant. In the art, these determinations can be referred to by color codes, such as GREEN, YELLOW, and RED.